Mesoamerican Archaeology E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 909

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A unique and wide-ranging introduction to the major prehispanic and colonial societies of Mexico and Central America, featuring new and revised material throughout

Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, provides readers with a diverse and well-balanced view of the archaeology of the indigenous societies of Mexico and Central America, helping students better understand key concepts and engage with contemporary debates and issues within the field. The fully updated second edition incorporates contemporary research that reflects new approaches and trends in Mesoamerican archaeology. New and revised chapters from first-time and returning authors cover the archaeology of Mesoamerican cultural history, from the early Gulf Coast Olmec, to the Classic and Postclassic Maya, to the cultures of Oaxaca and Central Mexico before and after colonization. Presenting a wide range of approaches that illustrate political, socio-economic, and symbolic interpretations, this textbook:

• Encourages students to consider diverse ways of thinking about Mesoamerica: as a linguistic area, as a geographic region, and as a network of communities of practice
• Represents a wide spectrum of perspectives and approaches to Mesoamerican archaeology, including coverage of the Postclassic and Colonial periods
• Enables readers to think critically about how explanations of the past are produced, verified, and debated
• Includes accessible introductory material to ensure that students and non-specialists understand the chronological and geographic frameworks of the Mesoamerican tradition
• Discusses recent developments in the contemporary theory and practice of Mesoamerican archaeology
• Presents new and original research by a team of internationally recognized contributors

Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, is ideal for use in undergraduate courses on the archaeology of Mexico and Central America, as well as for broader courses on the archaeology of the Americas.

Leseprobe

BLACKWELL STUDIES IN GLOBAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Series Editors: Lynn Meskell and Rosemary A. Joyce

Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology is a series of contemporary texts, each carefully designed to meet the needs of archaeology instructors and students seeking volumes that treat key regional and thematic areas of archaeological study. Each volume in the series, compiled by its own editor, includes 12–15 newly commissioned articles by top scholars within the volume’s thematic, regional, or temporal area of focus.

What sets the Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology apart from other available texts is that their approach is accessible yet does not sacrifice theoretical sophistication. The series editors are committed to the idea that useable teaching texts need not lack ambition. To the contrary, the Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology aim not only to immerse readers in fundamental archaeological ideas and concepts but also to illuminate more advanced concepts, thereby exposing readers to some of the most exciting contemporary developments in the field. Inasmuch, these volumes are designed not only as classic texts but also as guides to the vital and exciting nature of archaeology as a discipline.

Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Second Edition

Edited by Julia A. Hendon, Lisa Overholtzer, and Rosemary A. Joyce

Andean Archaeology

Edited by Helaine Silverman

African Archaeology: A Critical Introduction

Edited by Ann Brower Stahl

Archaeologies of the Middle East: Critical Perspectives

Edited by Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck

North American Archaeology

Edited by Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana DiPaolo Loren

The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory

Edited by Emma Blake and A. Bernard Knapp

Archaeology of Asia

Edited by Miriam T. Stark

Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific Islands

Edited by Ian Lilley

Historical Archaeology

Edited by Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman

Classical Archaeology, Second Edition

Edited by Susan E. Alcock and Robin G. Osborne

Prehistoric Europe

Edited by Andrew Jones

Prehistoric Britain

Edited by Joshua Pollard

Egyptian Archaeology

Edited by Willeke Wendrich

Social Bioarchaeology

Edited by Sabrina C. Agarwal and Bonnie A. Glencross

Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice

Second Edition

Edited by

Julia A. Hendon, Lisa Overholtzer, and Rosemary A. Joyce

This edition first published 2021

© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Edition History

Second Edition © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

First Edition © 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

The right of Julia A. Hendon, Lisa Overholtzer and Rosemary A. Joyce to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hendon, Julia A. (Julia Ann), editor. | Overholtzer, Lisa, editor. | Joyce, Rosemary A., 1956- editor. | John Wiley & Sons, publisher.

Title: Mesoamerican archaeology : theory and practice / edited by Julia A. Hendon, Lisa Overholtzer, Rosemary A Joyce.

Description: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021. Series: Wiley blackwell studies in global archaeology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020043053 (print) | LCCN 2020043054 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119160885 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119160915 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119160922 (epub) | ISBN 9781119160939 (obook) Subjects: LCSH: Mayas--Antiquities. | Indians of Mexico--Antiquities. |Indians of Central America--Antiquities.

Classification: LCC F1435 .M557 2021 (print) | LCC F1435 (ebook) | DDC 972.8/01--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043053

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043054

Cover image: © Rafal Kubiak/Shutterstock

Cover design by Wiley

Set in 10 on 12.5 pt Palatino LT Std by Integra Software Services, Pondicherry, India

Table of Contents

Cover

Series page

Title page

Copyright

Preface

List of Figures

Contributors

Chapter 1: Mesoamerica: From Culture Area to Networks of Communities of Practice

Chapter 2: Polity and Power in the Olmec Landscape

Chapter 3: Objects with Images: Meaning-Making in Formative Mesoamerica

Chapter 4: Monumental Cityscape and Polity at Teotihuacan

Chapter 5: Social and Ethnic Identity in the Classic Metropolis of Teotihuacan

Chapter 6: Household Archaeology and the Ancient Maya

Chapter 7: Inseparable Entities: Classic Maya Landscapes and Settlements

Chapter 8: Monte Albán and Early Urbanism in the Valley of Oaxaca: Maize, Mountains, and Monuments

Chapter 9: Conquests and Colonialisms in Postclassic and Early Colonial Nejapa, Oaxaca

Chapter 10: Writing History in the Postclassic Mixteca

Chapter 11: Resiliency and Cultural Reconstitution of the Postclassic Mayapan Confederacy and Its Aftermath

Chapter 12: Home Is Where the Ithualli Is: Toward a Microarchaeology of Aztec Households, Family Histories, and Social Identities

Chapter 13: Mexica Monumental Stone Sculpture: Constellations of Form, Meaning, and Change in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec Capital

Chapter 14: Bioarchaeological Research on Daily Life in the Emerging Colonial Society of Mexico City

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 1

Table 1.1 Summary chronological framework for Mesoamerica

Table 1.2 Archaeologically identifiable defining traits of Mesoamerica, organize...

Chapter 9

Table 9.1 Postclassic and Early Colonial period radiocarbon dated contexts in Ne...

Table 9.2 Ceramic and obsidian artifact densities at excavated Postclassic and E...

Chapter 10

Table 10.1 Surviving Precolonial style codices from Central and Southern Mexico

Chapter 14

Table 14.1 Total number of individuals included in this study divided into age a...

Table 14.2 Muscle movement groups, the entheses included in each group, and the ...

Table 14.3 Average entheseal change scores for the right side of the body for ea...

Table 14.4 Age and sex distribution for each of the groups derived from cluster ...

Table 14.5 Average entheseal change scores for the left side of the body for eac...

Table 14.6 Age and sex distribution for each of the groups derived from cluster ...

Table 14.7 Distribution of individuals among the cluster groups for the right an...

Table 14.8 Correlation of the mean scores for muscle movement groups on the righ...

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1

1.1 Map of Mesoamerica

1.2 Distribution of languages within Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conq...

Chapter 2

2.1 Maps of Olman. Top: locations of sites mentioned in the text and coverage of...

2.2 Physical landscapes of Olman. (a) Western Tabasco swamps viewed from La Vent...

2.3 Early Formative settlement patterns in three regions of Olman

2.4 Map of Mesoamerica, showing exchange of products to and from Gulf Olmec site...

2.5 LiDAR imagery of Tres Zapotes in high (dark gray) and low (light gray) resol...

2.6 Middle Formative settlement patterns in three regions of Olman

2.7 Macayal phase offering at El Manatí

2.8 Some examples of Olmec monumental sculpture. (a) Colossal head (Tres Zapotes...

2.9 Plans of civic–ceremonial precincts of Formative urban centers. Clockw...

2.10 Clockwise from left: San Martín Pajapan Monument, La Venta Monument 44...

2.11 Tres Zapotes Stela A

Chapter 3

3.1 An Olmec object with image: a jade earspool excavated at La Venta with incis...

3.2 Figurine fragment, Playa de los Muertos style, Ulua Valley

3.3 Figurine fragment depicting a monkey, Playa de los Muertos style, Ulua Valle...

3.4 Fragments of incised vessels from Puerto Escondido, Honduras...

3.5 An axe blade excavated at La Venta with incised lines suggesting a human fac...

3.6 Polished stone figurine excavated at La Venta with incised lines on the body...

3.7 Drawing of images on front and sides of La Venta altar or throne

3.8 Image of crocodilian creature with rain clouds, Chalcatzingo, Morelos

3.9 Image of woman laying hands on standing object, Chalcatzingo, Morelos

Chapter 4

4.1 Teotihuacan map by the Teotihuacan Mapping Project

4.2 Teotihuacan chronology table

4.3 View from the central axis of the Avenue of the Dead toward the Moon Pyramid...

4.4 Plan of the central zone of ancient Teotihuacan with measurements in meters ...

4.5 Reconstructed seven building stages (Edificio in Spanish) disclosed by tunne...

4.6 Plan of Burial 6 found in the Moon Pyramid. Bodies of sacrificed people were...

4.7 Plan and Profile of ancient tunnel created under the Sun Pyramid

4.8 Plan of Offering 2 found in a shallow pit excavated on subsoil in the Sun Py...

4.9 Plan of the Citadel and the Great Compound made from LiDAR imagery

4.10 General plan of reconstructed body positions of the FSP burials. The size o...

4.11 Drawing of the facade of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid in the Citadel

Chapter 5

5.1 The location of different compounds cited in the text in the map drawn by Re...

5.2 The Tlamimilolpa compound

5.3 The Xolalpan compound

5.4 The Tetitla compound

5.5 The Yayahuala compound

5.6 The Oztoyahualco 15B:N6W3 compound, excavated by Linda R. Manzanilla

5.7 The Oztoyahualco 15B theater-type censer related to burial 8

5.8 The Teopancazco neighborhood center with its functional sectors

5.9 The Xalla palatial compound excavated by Linda R. Manzanilla

5.10 The Xalla palace with its functional sectors

Chapter 6

6.1 The Copán Main Group in the Copán Valley, Honduras

6.2 Map of the Cerén village, El Salvador

6.3 The distribution of houses in the urban zone around the Main Group and in th...

6.4 Jade workshop in the patio of Strucutre M10-4 at Cancuen, Guatemala

6.5 A Copán urban courtyard

Chapter 7

7.1 Map of the Maya area, showing places mentioned in the text

7.2 Paired views of (a) raised fields and (b) Annie Hunter’s drawing of sp...

7.3 A restoration drawing of Copan in Honduras by Tatiana Proskouriakoff

7.4 Reconstructed view of Twin Pyramid Complex (4E-4), Tikal, Guatemala. The com...

7.5 Map of eastern part of Copan Valley pocket, highlighting groups 8L-10, 8L-12...

7.6 Three of seven paired groups across the Copan valley. (a) Ostuman neighborho...

7.7 Schematic plans of Maya civic–ceremonial centers of (a) Xunantunich, (...

7.8 Idealized reconstruction drawing of farmsteads set in agricultural terraces ...

7.9 Schematic plan of Chan’s Central Group. The eastern and western buildi...

Chapter 8

8.1 Map of the Valley of Oaxaca showing sites mentioned in the text

8.2 Mound 1 at San José Mogote. (a) Photograph of Mound 1. (b) View of Moun...

8.3 Photograph of Monument 3 from San José Mogote showing a victim of human...

8.4 Panorama of the Main Plaza of Monte Albán

8.5 Plan of the Main Plaza at Monte Albán showing architectural features me...

8.6 Photograph of in situ orthostats from Building L- sub with horizontal figure...

8.7 Hypothetical reconstruction by Javier Urcid of Building L-sub at Monte Alb...

8.8 Carved slabs reset in Building J. (a) Example of a slab depicting a revered ...

Chapter 9

9.1 Map of Oaxaca showing the locations of archaeological sites, towns, and regi...

9.2 Map of the Nejapa region showing the rivers, surveyed area, and archaeologic...

9.3 Multiple layers of red-painted stucco floor visible in the excavations of a ...

9.4 Rooms built into one of two cliff face rock shelters at Cerro del Convento

9.5 Defensive wall constructed at the narrowest point of the ridgeline at Los Pi...

9.6 The ball court at El Sitial

Chapter 10

10.1 Typical codex scenes, Codex Añute (Selden) page 8.

10.2 The visit of Lord 8 Deer and Lady 6 Monkey to the temple of Lady 9 Grass, C...

10.3 Schematic overview of the reconstruction process of Codex Yoho Yuchi. Hyper...

Chapter 11

11.1 Location of Mayapan and other places mentioned in the text. Dark gray-shade...

11.2 Map of walled Mayapan settlement, showing the location of the site center a...

11.3 Mural from Tulum Structure 5, portraying Postclassic Maya elites. Many Maya...

11.4 Map of Mayapan’s monumental center

11.5 Examples of human portraiture from Mayapan. (a) Stone sculpture. (b) Effigy...

11.6 Mayapan’s principle pyramid, the Temple of Kukulcan (left), and the M...

11.7 Location of outlying ceremonial groups beyond Mayapan’s city wall. Th...

Chapter 12

12.1 Burials forming four genealogical episodes in the household history on Stru...

12.2 House plan and genealogy in patios, Xochimilco, Mexico City, 1653. AGN Inte...

12.3 Burial of infant female in cooking jar, with upturned Aztec II Black-on-Ora...

12.4 Aztec II dish buried with infant female

12.5 Burial of a young adult male within the Structure 122 ithualli around 1435 ...

12.6 Flattening of the posterior cranial vault of the young adult male, side and...

12.7 Quartz lip plug interred with the young adult male, profile and front views

12.8 Burial of a middle-aged female within the Structure 122 ithualli around 147...

12.9 Black-on-Red dish interred with the middle-aged female

12.10 Turbina corymbosa leaves and seeds

Chapter 13

13.1 The island of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco

13.2 Archaeological remains of the Main Precinct in Mexico City downtown; the Te...

13.3 Diverse forms of Mexica sculpture. (a) Fusion water and fire deities (Nappa...

13.4 Sculptures from the master chronological sequence. (a) Calendric date Reed....

13.5 The Earth goddess Tlaltecuhtli constellation. (a) On the bottom of Coatlicu...

Chapter 14

14.1 Map of modern Mexico City with the black line indicating the island limits ...

14.2 Sample of clavicle bones indicating the range of robusticity scores for the...

14.3 Sample of clavicle bones indicating the range of stress lesion scores for t...

14.4 A rotating scatterplot for the right side of the body based on body mass an...

14.5 Line plot of muscle usage for right side cluster groups CR2 and CR3.

14.6 Line plot of muscle usage for right side cluster group CR1

14.7 A rotating scatterplot for the left side of the body based on body mass and...

14.8 Line plot of muscle usage for left side cluster groups CL1 and CL2387

Guide

Cover

Series Page

Title page

Copyright

Table of Contents

Preface

List of Figures

Contributors

Begin Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

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Preface

In the 17 years since the first edition of Mesoamerican Archaeology: Method and Theory was published, our goal of providing theoretically sophisticated and data-rich explorations of important topics for a nonspecialist reader, written by the researchers themselves, has proved successful. When approached by Wiley-Blackwell to edit a second edition, the original coeditors, Julia A. Hendon and Rosemary A. Joyce, agreed that the chance to incorporate new research by an international array of scholars was not to be missed. The first move was to add Lisa Overholtzer as editor. The three of us approached some authors from the first edition who agreed to update or rewrite their chapters. We then invited new contributors whose work reflects current research trends in Mesoamerican archaeology. For this edition we purposefully included a chapter on bioarchaeology and three chapters that include the Colonial period in their discussions.

As with the first edition, this book is intended to be useful for anyone teaching Mesoamerican archaeology, whether as the sole subject of a course or as one case study among others in courses dealing with archaeology of the Americas, complex societies, or other topics. We also expect that it will be of interest to any reader who wants a sample of contemporary research on the major time periods and societies that are the focus of Mesoamerican archaeology. Because this book is a departure from other models for introductory texts, it is appropriate for us to briefly explain what it is and is not and to suggest how we hope it might be incorporated into the classroom. All three of us teach material from the field of Mesoamerican archaeology in basic introductory courses and more advanced offerings. As active researchers who each have developed and led our own field projects, we find ourselves struggling to provide students with a sense of the research process. In particular, we think it is important for students to see that changes in archaeological understanding (or differences in opinion, as illustrated by some of the essays included here) are a constructive part of the research process. They reflect the mechanisms through which our discipline debates explanations, puts them to the test against existing and new data, and gradually revises them. Too often, we find that students (and people outside the academy interested in archaeology) have the impression, especially from media coverage, that changes in interpretation result from violent rejection of earlier ideas, represented as poorly conceived, foolish, or examples of bad work. We do not think that representing archaeology as a kind of winner-takes-all contest is very true to the reality of the constant hard work, only occasionally accompanied by moments of transformative insight, that we do as field researchers. Nor does the metaphor of a contest accurately represent the way that new research builds on and acknowledges older ideas, even in the process of modifying, extending, or disagreeing with those ideas.

We have each found that our teaching is most successful when we base it on a diversity of articles, written by scholars with different points of view. The juxtaposition of many different, but credible, arguments helps makes clear to students that there is not now, and never has been, a consensus about how to understand Mesoamerica’s prehispanic history, what the important questions are, and what the best way to investigate intriguing questions might be. Using research papers written by practitioners active in field and laboratory analyses brings the research process to life. It enables students to engage in critical thinking about how explanations of the past are produced, verified, and disputed. This engagement has the potential to promote a greater mastery of content and principles and a more enduring understanding of the archaeological process.

But there are also difficulties with this approach. Foremost among them, articles written for professional audiences assume a great degree of shared background knowledge. They begin in the middle of an ongoing research dialogue, where even everyday words can have very specific meanings. To use research articles in teaching requires us to spend substantial effort explaining specialist terms and assumptions. And even when this is done, there remains the fact that professional articles are written for particular contexts, often as part of edited volumes dealing with specific themes or issues. To make these articles effective outside their original setting, it is necessary to place them back in context through lectures, orienting notes, or annotations. We have been successful teaching from thematically focused edited volumes, where the context of all the articles is the same and the repetition of conceptual vocabulary reinforces our background discussions. But very few edited volumes cover the full chronological and geographic breadth of Mesoamerican archaeology.

Thus, in this second edition, we continue to provide a single volume containing new papers written with a nonspecialist reader in mind. By selecting contributors who are actively engaged in research on key time periods and topics in contemporary Mesoamerican archaeology, this volume provides what we have been piecing together from existing resources, but with an important difference. Written self-consciously as explanations of current issues in specific archaeological research areas within Mesoamerica and oriented toward the student or other nonspecialist, these papers provide the equivalent of a casebook optimally suited for teaching.

The response to our invitation to participate gratified us immensely, as extremely dedicated, busy researchers took the time to prepare new essays for this volume. Where possible, we sought to provide dual approaches to important time periods and places, hoping that these juxtapositions illuminate the way that research problems framed differently call for different methods of investigation and interpretation. We balanced contributions taking macroscale approaches with those examining the microscale that begins with the individual actor and extends outward to households, communities, and regions. The one thing we sought in every contribution was self-conscious attention to how problems were framed and what the effects of problem orientation were on research outcomes.

The resulting volume therefore considers research employing many different kinds of materials, highly diverse methods, and many strands of theory. Many of the contributors share with the editors an interest in questions of individual and group identity and agency and are exploring the implications of practice theory for Mesoamerican archaeology. Contributors who do not explicitly use concepts from practice theory nonetheless take seriously the same kinds of questions about how individual people who are raised in a specific cultural, social, and natural environment continue the traditions in which they were raised while also subtly modifying them so that, to modern observers, they can be seen as participants in sequences of social change. All the contributors examine particular practices, perceptible to modern researchers because they left material traces, and consider the significance these practices had in the formation and reformation of Mesoamerican societies over a long historical trajectory that did not end with Spanish colonization.

We have included sufficient orienting material in this volume to ensure that students and other interested readers will understand the chronological and geographic frameworks of the Mesoamerican tradition and will recognize key issues in its history. Because this volume includes an introduction explicitly sketching out the contexts necessary to understand Mesoamerican archaeology as a subject, it can also serve to contextualize other research articles that might be used to complement the contents of this volume. As a casebook of theoretically explicit studies, it should serve as a resource for comparison with archaeologies from other world areas. Our goal was to be selective, not exhaustive. We attempt not to replace comprehensive syntheses of Mesoamerican prehistory but instead to complement them with a volume that takes understanding how we know as central to understanding what we know. Finally, we hope that this volume gives all of its readers a sense of the exciting developments in the contemporary theory and practice of Mesoamerican archaeology and encourages them to delve further into the original research cited by all the contributors.

Julia A. Hendon

Lisa Overholtzer

Rosemary A. Joyce

Contributors

Wendy Ashmore (deceased) was professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. She conducted field research in the Maya lowlands in Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, and pioneered research in household archaeology and landscape archaeology.

Ángel González López is GSK curatorial research fellow at the North Carolina Museum of Art. The primary focus of his research is on iconographic analyses of Late Postclassic art in Central Mexico. He founded the Aztec Stone Sculpture from the Basin of Mexico Project to create a standardized database of monuments that are currently found in various educational institutions in the United States, Mexico, and Europe.

Julia A. Hendon is professor of anthropology at Gettysburg College. She has carried out research at the Maya kingdom of Copán and in the lower Ulúa river valley in Honduras. She studies social identity, daily life, technology, and social memory. Her book Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica was awarded the 2015 Linda S. Cordell Book Award in Archaeology.

Arthur A. Joyce is professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He directs long-term interdisciplinary research in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on issues of political dynamics, urbanism, religion, human impact on the environment, and the preceramic. He draws on theoretical and methodological inspirations ranging from the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences.

Rosemary A. Joyce is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducts field and museum research on Honduras, in sites dating from the Formative through Republican periods. She uses analyses of ceramic artifacts to understand subjectivity (e.g., sex and gender) and materiality (e.g., technology and human–nonhuman networks of activity).

Stacie M. King is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the long-term history of Oaxaca, Mexico, and her publications address colonial entanglements, household social organization, craft production, interregional interaction, mortuary practices, food sharing, and public outreach.

Linda R. Manzanilla is professor of archaeology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM, Institute for Anthropological Research). She is also a member of El Colegio Nacional. Her research concerns the first urban settlements and early states. She is widely recognized for her innovative interdisciplinary research on households and neighborhoods at Teotihuacan. She holds a doctorate in Egyptology from the Sorbonne.

Marilyn Masson is professor of anthropology at the University at Albany State University New York. She directs a long-term archaeological research project in Yucatan, Mexico, with an international collaborative team. Her research interests include societal regeneration after collapse and culture contact from the perspective of household economies in urban and rural settings of late Pre-Columbian and early Colonial Maya society.

Lisa Overholtzer is assistant professor and William Dawson Chair at McGill University. Her research examines the everyday material practices of ordinary people in Postclassic and Colonial Central Mexico. She is interested in household production and consumption; gender, ethnic, class, and age-based identities; and social memory and time in archaeology. She is committed to decolonizing archaeological practice through collaboration with Indigenous descendant communities. She currently directs a community-engaged household archaeology project at Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, such as American Anthropologist, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, and Ancient Mesoamerica.

Christopher A. Pool is university research professor in anthropology at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include the origins and operation of ancient polities and economies, the archaeology of landscapes and social memory, historical ecology, geoarchaeology, archaeometry, and ceramic analysis. He pursues these interests primarily through fieldwork on the Olmec and later cultures of the southern Gulf Coast of Mexico.

Cynthia Robin is professor of anthropology at Northwestern University. She has conducted fieldwork at Maya archaeological sites in Belize. Her research focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary people in the past and the development of sustainable lifeways.

Ludo Snijders is an independent research who received his PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands. He has studied Mesoamerican manuscripts from the perspective of cultural biography and is specialized in the application of noninvasive techniques for the recovery of palimpsests.

Nawa Sugiyama is assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her research at Teotihuacan, Mexico, has covered topics pertaining to the construction of ritualized landscapes, human–animal interactions, and urban foodways.

Saburo Sugiyama is research professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. He has conducted fieldwork at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid and the Moon and the Sun Pyramids and currently investigates Plaza of the Columns Complex in Teotihuacan. His research focuses on ancient urbanism, monuments, ritual and polity, and cognitive archaeology.

Julie K. Wesp is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and a faculty affiliate in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at North Carolina State University. Her research draws on bioarchaeological methods to reconstruct daily life in the past and contribute to Latin American history with current research projects in Mexico and Colombia.

1 Mesoamerica From Culture Area to Networks of Communities of Practice

Rosemary A. Joyce

This book is an introduction to archaeological research on societies that flourished in Mexico and Central America before European colonization, whose descendants continue to occupy the region today. Archaeologists studying these societies describe them as part of a cultural area, Mesoamerica (Figure 1.1). Contemporary indigenous peoples who survived colonization have continuing traditions of practices recognizably connected to those of the period before colonization. Yet these people, past or present, never expressed an identification at this regional scale: instead, a mosaic of communities varying in size from small villages to large cities, governed in a variety of ways, with individual histories that intersected but unfolded in their own ways occupied this geographic territory. This book treats Mesoamerican archaeology as the exploration of the material traces of learned practices, reproduced over generations, through which people in this area engaged with each other, producing shared values and identities. This reinterpretation of Mesoamerica identifies it as a label for what, using anthropological concepts developed since the 1990s, we can call localized communities of practice and more widely distributed networks of practice.

Figure 1.1 Map of Mesoamerica.

To understand this approach, this chapter outlines how time is understood and measured in research on Mesoamerica; describes the practices that define Mesoamerican cultural traditions, giving special attention to mathematics, calendars, and writing that are the most distinctive aspects of these societies; and considers alternative ways of thinking about Mesoamerica as a linguistic area, as a geographic region, and as a network of communities of practice.

History, Chronology, and Time in Mesoamerican Archaeology

There is no single chronology that is employed by all archaeologists for all of Mesoamerica, but a broad division into Archaic, Formative (or Preclassic), Classic, Postclassic, and Colonial periods is generally recognized. Precise beginning and ending dates vary with the region and often with the specific author. The contributions to this volume are no exception. With slight differences, however, the contributors draw on a single chronological framework for these major periods (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Summary chronological framework for Mesoamerica

Dates in years

Period

8000–1600 BCE

Archaic

1600–900 BCE

Early Formative

900–400 BCE

Middle Formative

400 BCE –250 CE

Late Formative

250–600 CE

Early Classic

600–1000 CE

Late Classic

1000–1521 CE

Postclassic

1521–1820 CE

Colonial

The words used to name these spans of time are significant; they demonstrate that this chronological framework comes from a particular theoretical perspective, one associated with the idea of cultural evolution. From a cultural evolutionary perspective, the history of Mesoamerica is also the story of the gradual development of a cultural peak in the Classic period from its initial roots and of a decline after that peak. Each span of time had a particular character and a characteristic level of development. In the Archaic, people lived as mobile hunter-gatherers. The Formative (or Preclassic) was initiated by the advent of the first settled villages of farmers. While some Formative villages had leaders in ritual, war, and other activities, these forms of leadership were not codified into permanent, inherited statuses. With the Classic period, fully developed forms of permanent status, and extreme divisions among people, were realized in cities. The Classic cities collapsed, and in the Postclassic new urban societies emerged that were less impressive, smaller, more secular, or otherwise disadvantageously compared with their Classic predecessors.

These broad time spans, in other words, were not simply periods of abstract time, but rather stages of cultural development. Stages are diagnosed by specific features, like agriculture, pottery, settled villages, hereditary status, and cities. These can be developed at various dates by different peoples. As a result, despite using the same broad categories, researchers working in different sites assigned slightly different dates to each stage. The beginning of the Classic period in the Basin of Mexico was correlated with the maximum development of the great city of Teotihuacan. In the Maya area, it was tied to the first use of writing and calendars on public monuments.

Despite a general move in archaeology away from this early form of cultural evolutionary theory, Mesoamerican archaeology is stuck using an inherited framework of time periods that are really stages. Characteristics that were supposed to define the beginning of a stage are now found to have begun before the initial date of the stage. In the Maya area, the defining feature of the Classic period, written texts and dates on monuments, originated in Late Preclassic times. Archaeologists today treat stage names as labels for arbitrary time segments. Yet the unwanted implication of progress and decline remains embedded in the names for those stages.

From Superposition to Relative Chronology

Scholars often take for granted questions involved in creating chronology: how archaeologists generate dates for events; how these are generalized to time spans; and how theoretical assumptions affect the development of regional chronologies. In order to construct sequences of events, archaeology is dependent on a number of techniques to establish the relative age of material traces: which came first and which followed after. The fundamental principle of superposition, stressed in every introductory archaeology textbook as the key to relative dating, uses an image of layers, one on top of another, corresponding to distinct time periods, with the most deeply buried being oldest and the others following in order. This is, unfortunately, somewhat too simple.

While part of the process of establishing relative chronologies does depend on superposition, superimposed deposits are usually more discontinuous and fragmentary than the layer-cake image presented in textbooks. In many parts of Mesoamerica, major architectural monuments were rebuilt multiple times. The sequence of stages of construction has been a key to establishing local chronology. But fine-grained histories of construction at particular buildings cannot be directly applied elsewhere, even in the same site: the layers superimposed in one place have to be tied to layers superimposed in another.

In the history of Mesoamerican archaeology, the main means of linking together different construction histories was the identification of distinctive types of artifacts, especially styles of ceramics, found in layers at different locations within sites and across regions. Artifacts, especially ceramics, were treated like the “index fossils” of geology, on the assumption that, like natural organisms, styles of pottery had histories with well-defined beginnings and endpoints. Archaeologists are used to things being messier in real life, with pieces of pottery popular at different times becoming mixed together as human beings remodeled buildings and reoccupied previously abandoned terrain. Yet the problem with using artifacts to relate different sites goes further.

In each region where a significant amount of work has been accomplished, sequences have been established for the introduction, growth in popularity, and abandonment of pottery styles. These histories of popularity of pottery, in combination with superimposed architectural sequences, are the fundamental basis for local chronology building. By convention, local units of time derived in this way, called phases, are given names unique to particular sites or regions: Ojochi, Bajío, Chicharras at San Lorenzo, and Cuanalan, Patlachique, Tzacualli, Miccaotli, Tlamimilolpa, Xolalpan, and Metepec at Teotihuacan, for example.

Once such sequences were established in one area, they can be used to help establish sequences in other regions, where items of known relative date (phase) arrived through exchange. Even when items of exactly the types used to create the original sequence are not found, similarities between different regions can be attributed to contact between them, and local sequences coordinated on that basis. The assignment to the period between around 1200 and 900 BCE of pottery with motifs similar to pots of the Gulf Coast Olmec, made in distinct local traditions, is precisely this kind of coordination of different local sequences, not by the presence of an actual index fossil but by the common preference for particular ways of making pottery or other artifacts distinctive of a specific period in time.

This step of correlating different regional sequences raises a problem that Mesoamerican archaeologists continue to grapple with today. The assumption that has to be made is that sites with a shared artifact type or trait are (roughly) contemporaries. This is fine as long as the goal of chronology building is getting places aligned in a common framework of general equivalence on the scale of centuries. This was the procedure of Mesoamerican archaeology through the first half of the twentieth century, when it was dominated by the approach now called culture history. Culture historians aimed to establish the distributions across time and space of different traits, understood as part of sets of traits characterizing distinct cultures. This was viewed as a first step required before more anthropological questions could be formulated and addressed.

The assumption of contemporaneity required to align chronological sequences is more problematic if the questions archaeologists want to explore deal with interaction at a human scale, of the lifetime or generation, where understanding the direction of interaction from one place to another requires finer-grained distinctions in chronology than phases of a century or more. When chronologies are aligned based on shared relative order of innovations, and the necessary assumption of rough equivalence in time of these things, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to ask or answer questions like, “Did the suite of practices recognized as ‘Toltec’ develop at Chichen Itza, or was the site rebuilt following a Mexican pattern originating earlier at Tula, Hidalgo?” Even within single sites, the correlation of events across different excavated contexts, which may be critical to understanding how the actions of human beings affected different social segments or institutions, is made more difficult by the homogenizing effect of constructing chronological sequences composed of blocks of time, even relatively short ones like those recognized at Teotihuacan.

The issue is not simply that the blocks of time are too long. The construction of chronologies as blocks of time cuts ongoing sequences of life into segments. In saying things like, “Hereditary social inequality developed in Oaxaca during the Middle Formative (850–300 BCE),” archaeologists understand that sometime during this block of time, perhaps over a single generation, parents were able to transmit political authority to their children. The actual date of the institution of inheritance of wealth, titles, and positions of power happened at a human scale, during the lifetime of people. They could have lived early or later in this block of time. Changes in social relationships that allowed intergenerational transfers and legitimized them may have happened repeatedly during the chunk of time so that in one village hereditary social inequality developed around 800 BCE, in another around 600 BCE, in another only at 300 BCE, and in yet another never at all.

Archaeologists understand that the use of time segments to organize their discussions is a claim that a particular event or events of interest to them happened sometime during the block of time, not that the event lasted for the whole period. What archaeologists excavate aren’t these social and historical events. They excavate and analyze remains of a series of depositional events, human and natural actions that resulted in or transformed residues of past human activity.

These actions include those that create deposits and those that deform, reform, and remove them through flooding and erosion, trash disposal, and borrowing sediment for architectural fill. Depositional events are ongoing, as humans live in places they modify for their purposes, as floods and earthquakes and even volcanic eruptions happen. What archaeologists excavate are discontinuous depositional units, identifiable in contact with each other at surfaces that may represent substantial gaps in time during which other depositional events took place that left no material residues and may have removed earlier ones.